If you missed last night’s Grammy Awards, consider yourself lucky. They were truly terrible, absolutely awful, and thoroughly reprehensible. And that’s not putting too fine a point on it. But since I was forced to sit through all three hours and forty-some-odd minutes of it, so that I could live tweet the event via @PhillyMagTicket, only to have @PhillyMagTicket get inexplicably suspended by Twitter, well, then you’re going to have to sit through my synopsis of the evening. I’ll keep it short.

What Happened to Madonna?

That is the question everyone is asking. If it’s sexist to sit here blasting a woman for her looks, especially when we don’t give the same amount of thought or space to Kris Kristofferson’s cadaver-like appearance, then I am sexist. Madonna looked almost freakish. Comparisons have been made to the Quaker Oats guy (who is not William Penn), Sally Starr, Colonel Sanders, Boss Hogg and Elaine Stritch. All apt.

Even Cecily Tynan Loves Lorde

Minimize the Collaborations

I get it. Why should you just let Pharrell and Daft Punk perform their song together when you can have Pharrell and Daft Punk perform their song with Grammy-winning legend Stevie Wonder? The answer to that question is that the collaborations don’t work more often than they do. My favorite collaboration was Kendrick Lamar with Imagine Dragons (see below). My least favorite was Metallica with pianist Lang Lang, a Curtis alum. They took one of Metallica’s fiercest songs (“One”) and somehow made the first two thirds of it anemic. And don’t even get me started on the country nonsense with Kristofferson. Bleh.

2014: Year of the Bolo Tie?

Granted, there were far more bow ties than bolo ties at the Grammys, but when you’ve got at least three bolo-sporting celebrities on camera during the ceremony, something has to be up. “They’re hideous,” declares Philadelphia magazine fashion editor Emily Goulet. Agreed.

Philly Was Well-Represented

OK, so Taylor Swift (whose performance surprised me, in a good way) is from Reading, John Legend only went to UPenn, and, as LL Cool J pointed out, Pink is from “Bucks County, Pennsylvania,” but still. Other (actual) Philly talent in the house included comedian Kevin Hart and South Philly-native (and former Kanye West companion) Amber Rose, who turned heads with her post-baby body.

Pick One Beatle

You don’t need Paul and Ringo, and I think if you have to pick one, it’s not a hard decision. But at least Yoko Ono, all cleavage-y at 80, had a good time.

The Blinking Suits Win

I don’t get into the whole E Red Carpet nonsense, but I do pay attention to what people are wearing onstage. Beyonce was dressed like Miley Cyrus. Madonna, well… It basically came down to the guys in Daft Punk and their sci-fi glam vs. the guys in Kacey Musgraves’ band and their blinking electric suits, and I have to give it to the latter, although I’ll take that overplayed Daft Punk/Pharrell tune over Musgraves’ whininess any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Twitter Saved the Grammys

When I signed into Twitter on Sunday night, I wasn’t surprised to see that #GRAMMYS was the top trend. But I was a bit surprised to see that it was a sponsored hashtag, meaning someone paid a lot of money to get it to the top and make it stay there. And it turns out that this money was money (very) well spent, because Twitter wound up saving the Grammys. I don’t think half of us who watched the whole wretched thing would have done so if we didn’t have Twitter as an immediate outlet for our aggression, mockery, and pithy remarks.

There were something like 15 million Grammy tweets during the show, with the Kendrick Lamar/Imagine Dragons collaboration leading the way as most-tweeted about performance, with 171,593 tweets per minute at one point. Lorde came in at both second and third place, according to Time.

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